ENGL 5169-001

Native American and Indigenous Film, Penny Kelsey

This seminar examines contemporary, emergent Native North American film and visualities in relationship to cultures and identities, knowledge and epistemic production, time and indigenous futurisms.  Cultural narratives and tribal knowledges (i.e., “oral traditions”) have played and continue to perform key roles in Indigenous American artists’ creative processes like filmic storyboarding and the resultant visual records; at the same time, indigenous artists seek to continually innovate grounded, local epistemes through endeavors like tribal language adaptations of Star Wars and scifi representations of migration stories in Futurestates.  This seminar begins with mainstream films that seek solely to represent indigenous peoples with accuracy (i.e., Winter in the Blood, Rumble), moves into first-generation independent films (i.e., Shelley Niro’s It Starts with a Whisper (1993)), and focuses largely on recent independent short films of the fictional, documentary, and animated varieties.  Course readings and screenings will include an array of texts by NAIS scholars and theorists and films directed by indigenous filmmakers. Critical methodologies will be gathered from works by First Nations, Native American, Native Hawaiian, and other Indigenous literary critics, historians, and social scientists.

MA Designation: Multicultural/Postcolonial Literature, A (Formalisms), B (Technologies/Epistemologies), C (Bodies/Identities/Collectivities), D (Cultures/Politics/Histories)

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Ralph Ellison may be the preeminent black American author of the twentieth century, though he published only one novel, 1952’s Invisible Man. Over a career that spanned more than half a century, Ellison published two essay collections, wrote dozens of articles, and delivered numerous speeches, but he never published the second novel he had been composing for more than forty years.

This seminar provides an opportunity for close and comprehensive study of the oeuvre of a single writer. We’ll read all of Ellison’s major works and consider the relationships among his fiction, essays, interviews, and letters. At the same time, we shall engage the numerous strains of critical and theoretical discourse that surround Ellison. Finally, the course will provide unparalleled access to Ellison’s literary archive—the unpublished notes, drafts, and other materials housed in the Library of Congress.

MA-Lit Course Designation: Multicultural/Postcolonial Literature, A (Formalisms), C (Bodies/Identities/Collectivities), D (Cultures/Politics/Histories)

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This graduate seminar will investigate the production, circulation, and translation of 20th- and 21st- century Afro-diasporic cultures that track the Middle Passage and traverse Africa, Europe and the Americas. Taking a cultural materialist approach to literature, visual arts including film, and music, we will think about these works less as finished products than in terms of their movement, exchange, and translation within transnational circuits. Through this lens, we will take up questions of how the histories and losses of the Black Atlantic shift boundaries between persons, spirits, things, and animals; what archives and methods re-member these histories and losses; what political, civic, legal, and disciplinary sites produce Black Atlantic subjects and subjections; and how queer, feminist, immigrant, and indigenous relations forge new Afro-diasporic ontologies, politics, and collectivities.

Course Requirements: Midterm short paper (8-10 pages), presentation, and longer seminar paper, written in stages. Authors may include: Paul Gilroy, Toni Morrison, CLR James, Zadie Smith, Zora Neale Hurston, Erna Brodber, Sylvia Wynter, Nnedi Okorafor, Alice Childress, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, and others.

MA-Lit Course Designation: C (Bodies/Identities/Collectivities), Multicultural/ Postcolonial, Literature After 1800

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This course has two goals—to introduce you to Mexican and Latino cultural forms and theory, mostly literary, from the 18^th to the 21^stcentury.  The second is to explore theories of information and New Realist studies, specifically, Ferraris’ theories of documentality, in order to explore the how Mexicans have engaged and been constituted by discourses of un/documentality.  Learning the theory and practice of what I am calling “un/documentality,” we will engage how “acts” across historical, political and aesthetic boundaries constitute and remake an un/documented self.  In doing so, we will juxtapose myriad cultural forms, mainly print narratives and some film, in order to chart the complicated ways in which Mexicans have expressed themselves in the US. Along the way, we will also locate important liminal moments in Latin@ literary, political, cinematic and cultural history.  By the end of the course, I hope we will have a strong grasp of Mexican film, letters, history and the political, gendered, and racial formation of Mexicans and Latinos/as in the US.

MA-Lit Course Designation: B (Technologies/ Epistemologies), C (Bodies/Identities/Collectivities), D (Cultures/Politics/Histories), Multicultural/ Postcolonial

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